AP, February 17, 2009
{snip}
Amid the terror and oppression, civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois published a groundbreaking book in 1924 that challenged the pervasive stereotypes of African Americans and documented their rarely recognized achievements.
His book, “The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America,” detailed the role of African Americans with the earliest explorers to inventions ranging from ice cream to player pianos. He argued that blacks were crucial to conquering the wilderness, winning wars, expanding democracy and creating a prosperous economy by producing tobacco, sugar, cotton and rice and helping to build the Panama Canal.
“The Negro worked as farm hand and peasant proprietor, as laborer, artisan and inventor and as servant in the house, and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible,” DuBois wrote.
{snip}
“African-Americans have served on the Supreme Court, in the cabinet, and, finally, as president of the United States,” Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus, wrote in the introduction. “The Gift of Black Folk allows us to fully appreciate these monumental achievements.”
{snip}
Gates [Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who edited DuBois’ works], who is considering doing an introduction to the book, said he hopes the decision to issue a new edition “would augur a more liberal set of social policies for the Knights of Columbus.”
{snip}
A black man named Estevanico was the first European to discover Arizona and New Mexico after others on the expedition died. {snip}
Blacks invented devices for handling sails, corn harvesters and an evaporating pan which revolutionized the method of refining sugar. Another inventor created a machine for the mass production of shoes that was used by the United Shoe Machinery Company.
{snip}
The U.S. Patent Office at the time maintained records for 1,500 inventions by blacks, an incomplete record, DuBois said. Black scientists did important work on insects and insanity.
Benjamin Banneker was a leading American scientist whose mathematical genius won the praise of Thomas Jefferson and led the slave owner to question notions of racial superiority.
{snip}
The book portrays Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, as leading the fight against British soldiers that sparked the famous Boston massacre of 1770. {snip}
Black soldiers and slaves helped saved New Orleans during the War of 1812, winning praise from General Andrew Jackson. {snip}
“Without the active participation of the Negro in the Civil War, the union could not have been saved, nor slavery destroyed, in the nineteenth century,” DuBois wrote.
In fighting slavery, blacks forced the country to expand its democracy and wound up winning rights for poor whites who did not own property, DuBois argued. Their efforts also led to social reforms such as free public schools.
{snip}
Original article
(Posted on February 17, 2009)
Comments
I am quite sure that all the “history” of Black accomplishment written about in this book is revisionist at best and lies at worst but, frankly, who cares? Even if any of their past accomplishments are true, as the old saying goes, “what have you done for me lately?” If Blacks in the past were beacons of progress and culture, it only makes their current affection for thieving, idleness and drugs that much more abhorrent.
If blacks want to achieve true greatness, they should become slaves again. Only slavery seems to inspire them to greatness.
Who knows what they might have achieved as slaves? Non-polluting energy. Perpetual motion. The end of war, human struggles, and conflicts. The first man on Mars. Anti-gravity. Unified field theory.
Slavery ended too soon. We’ll never know what greatness could have been …
With all due respect, picking cotton did not build America. African Americans have had precious little to do with building this country, but had had a huge hand in destroying it.
Black scientists did important work on insects and insanity.
You mean black scientists did studies of crazy crickets, nutty gnats, and freaked out flies?? What would we Americans have done without such knowledge!
Seriously though: this made-up folderol -that America was built “on the Red Man’s land and by the Black Man’s hand”- is going to become part of the curriculum our white children are forced to learn, as the technology their ancestors invented is forgotten and the civilization their people left them is overwhelmed. Unless the intellectual, spiritual and political tyranny of “anti-racism” is destroyed, we will all be forced in the future to bend the knee to this kind of mythology - indeed, I foresee that it will eventually become a criminal offense to “deny” these concocted “achievements” of the blacks.
well then, you should do good on standardized tests and be able to fully participate in the society without being poverty stricken, loose in morals and prone to violence. you can also now quit straightening your hair and dying it unnatural colors to look white because “black is beautiful.” you should also be fully self sufficient in any nation where you are the dominate population. the article does not line up with reality.
if this could all be done under the harsh conditions of servitude why isn’t it true when you are free? maybe something about servitude MADE you accomplish more. it would be called “the man.” the man who taught you mathematics, engineering,cultivation, architecture etc…the evil “man.” it amazes me that in the past if a black did excel he was often recognized for it and allowed to participate in the society to a greater degree, but today he is expecting to participate without any excellence whatsoever. except hustlin’, or conning, or dancing, or rapping, or basketball, or dancing, or basketball and don’t forget basketball.
swoooosh…..
“A black man named Estevanico was the first European to discover Arizona and New Mexico after others on the expedition died.”
Yawn, that is where I stopped reading!
What is the point of going on, when there isn’t even a proper, or worse a willfully distorted, distinction between Africans and Europeans?
The usual rubbish and lies, to be sure. One wonders, when it will be standard textbook lore that a black “European” discovered the moon and then walked on it?
As always, God help us all!
There’s a reason this article was published in Entertainment News.
Yep, it’s whitey who owes his very existence to the black man. If it weren’t for the black man and his “hard work” and his “inventions” it would be whitey living a backwards existence in third world squalor. Yeah, right.
I sincerely hope they continue to look no further than their own tribe and their own ploughed fields, thus denying themselves full participation in what is America. The more inward they become, the less influence they will ever hope to ever have. In the end, they will become so fixated on their own color that they will share no part beyond that color. Maybe then a black Moses will lead them somewhere else….to the “promised land”.
Let them have one of the states to call their own. At this point, I really do not care which one they get. After a few years it will be like Haiti or Atlanta.
Every time someone tries to feed me this kind of “fiction”, I always ask them that if blacks have such great inventive minds, why do we never see any inventions coming out of Africa? I mean, if this fiction were true, shouldn’t Africa be the hub of most inventions today! And how is it that blacks in this country supposedly invented all these things 1-2 hundred yrs. ago, but in my lifetime I can’t think of one thing that blacks have invented! You can be rest assured that if blacks invented ANYTHING of substance in the last 50 yrs., the liberals and blacks would never let us forget it. They always take credit for inventions made decades or centuries ago because those people are long gone and can’t prove them wrong, but they never take credit for more recent inventions because most of those people are still around and CAN prove them wrong. Believe me, a hundred yrs. from now when all of us are gone, blacks will have invented space travel and the first man on the moon was a black man!!!!
“I can’t think of one thing that blacks have invented! “
True Fact: a Black invented the Super-Soaker Water gun!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Johnson_(inventor)
could you imagine a white kid going to a detroit school and being taught this rubbish, then going outside and looking around at the utter madness which is detroit, truly mindblowing
Whatever blacks may have contributed is more then offset by the harm they have caused. They commit a disproportionate share of crime. They are also a drain on resources. We would be much better off if Europeans and Asians had not taken any people from Africa. To this day, left to their own devices, blacks would not be able to get to the Western Hemisphere. We would be much better off without them today, and never having had them here. The balance sheet for blacks has liabilities that exceed assets — a negative net worth.
Whow! Such a little percentage of the population made such a huge contribution to the building of the country! I am just speechless! And to think my grandparents picked their own cotton! Only if they had known!
Yes, he is correct; without blacks, America could have achieved its constitutional, pan-European-American greatness that was Godly inspired but one -way racial altruism derailed this utopia for its original, indidgenous American, Euro- people.In the ” Golden Rule ” you don’t treat un-like people ” better ” then one-self, just equal. White-Christians just can’t tell the difference, even at the expense of their own genocidal holocaust.
Hmmmmm…and yet somehow places like Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Iceland, etc., developed modern civilizations astonishingly similar to America with scarcely a single, solitary Black in their midst!! However can that be???
Putting aside all this nonsense about black “achievement” can you imagine how wonderful our society would have been without blacks? Lower taxes. All those trillions sunk into the black community for welfare, section 8 housing, food stamps, etc. Smaller and more efficient government. No more “make work” jobs, affirmative action, quotas, etc. The best man or woman gets the job. No White flight or sprawl. The massive movement to the suburbs would never have happened. Our cities would be cultural icons like European ones. Education. We would have one of the best public education systems in the world. Lower crime. Our crime rates would be comparable to Western Europe.
Funny how Whites in Canada, operating under far harsher climactic conditions, built a free and prosperous country without any participation by blacks at all. The truth is the presence of blacks in America was immaterial to developing it and has been a major drag on the country.
If black people were not in America, we would have less crime.
From the article:
“Amid the terror and oppression [NATURALLY, THEY ADD THIS POINTLESS EDITORIAL CONTENT], civil rights pioneer [THEY ARE ALL PIONEERS, AREN’T THEY?] W.E.B. DuBois published a groundbreaking book in 1924 [BIG DEAL - I THINK FATTY ARBUCKLE AND A MILLION OTHER PEOPLE ALSO PUBLISHED BOOKS THAT YEAR] that challenged the pervasive stereotypes of African Americans [ONCE AGAIN] and documented their rarely recognized achievements [BECAUSE THEY NEVER HAPPENED].
Just because W.E.B. wrote a book doesn’t mean it’s true. You’d think he wrote the Bible.
It is sad that they have to dredge up something clearly delusional from 85 years ago and couldn’t find anything more recent. Age does not make it true - only harder to refute. Maybe we can get the second (revised) edition on Oprah’s book club - where the black man is found to have invented the white man.
The biggest mistake our forefathers made was buying slaves from Africa.We will never stop paying for it. I can only dream of how wonderful this country would have been without the high crime rates, failing schools, welfare dependency, etc…
Athletics and entertainment. They’ve contributed next to nothing outside of these fields. Black studies “scholarship” is practiced in a ridiculously disingenuous and shameless manner. It is a field of study dominated by charlatans who make bizarre leaps of logic and lie. A good book that exposes the way these frauds operate is “Not out of Africa” by Mary Lefkowitz.
Some revisionist history is held sacred, no all, but some.
“As we know it” is the telling phrase. Would have been nice if we could have known it another way.
Think of the trouble we would have avoided minus the “know it.”
When Portuguese caravel’s arrived on the coast of Africa in the early 15th century, the sailors found wild, barbarous tribesmen only too willing to sell their fellow blacks. They lived in huts, wore animal skins, and had no machinery or modern implements of any kind. Indeed, even today stories abound of African “refugees” in America who have never used a toilet, a pencil, a telephone or ridden in a car. If blacks have invented anything at all, it came as a result of living in a modern, western society in close proximity with whites with a standard of living that freed them from hunting and gathering dancing around campfires.
“…and without him, America as we know it, would have been impossible,” DuBois wrote.
He was right, but not in the way he thought.
Call the article too ridiculous to believe! America would have have been just as good had not a single Black EVER set foot on this continent? If Blacks truly were such unsung geniuses as this article would have us believe… WHY was Africa in say, 1492, the year America was discovered, so many THOUSAND YEARS behind White Europeans. Like who stopped those African intellectuals from acquiring all the knowlege and learning on their own, all that science and learning which made the Industrial Revolution feasible around the early part of the 18th Century?
Come on friends… I am eagerly WAITING for the answer to that one.
This guy is absolutely right. I wholeheartedly agree. America as we know it would be impossible without blacks. No more rap music, less crime, less welfare, less riots, less drug use, less of those beautiful housing projects, no more “urban fashion.” A sad day indeed!
“Black soldiers and slaves helped saved New Orleans during the War of 1812, winning praise from General Andrew Jackson.”
And what happened to New Orleans right after Katrina…?
Blacks retarded white european American culture by destroying our urban centers. They relegated us to the suburbs and countryside. As a result of this, we cannot congregate together in large numbers in cities, which is the circumstance which historically has caused cultures to develop their highest achievements. High achievements of civilization have typically developed in urban centers - think of London, Dublin or Paris in the 1800s - nowadays we no longer possess any urban centers of our own.
Black destruction of urban white America is the reason why we have no High Culture, and why we live dispersed far from one another, linked mostly by the media, which is under the control of another ethnic group. The media has become our common culture because sprawl and white flight caused us to live separated from one another by large distances.
This is the reason why Britney Spears, Madonna and Saturday Night Live have become our common culture. In other words, the damage done is massive and can never be truly calculated.
One of the obvious things apparent to early white explorers was that Subsaharan Africans had never even conceived of a 2 story building, let alone built one.
I loved the reference to “supersoaker” squirtgun posting. That gadget truly is a great leap forward for humanity. Someone call the Nobel committee.
How truly remarkable that the black African races are unique among all others for their regression, going from being brilliant inventors, scientists, artisans, artists, explorers, industrialists, and soldiers to being unsuccessful, criminally-inclined, chronically unemployed, and underachieving universal failures.
Wouldn’t it be groovy if there were no blacks in America. Can you picture it. Our cities would be the finest examples of a great culture. Clean streets and very little crime. You could walk down it’s streets and take public transportation without the fear of getting mugged or raped or worse. Boy, that would be paradise. The finest living standards immaginable.
“Athletics and entertainment. They’ve contributed next to nothing outside of these fields. Black studies “scholarship” is practiced in a ridiculously disingenuous and shameless manner. It is a field of study dominated by charlatans who make bizarre leaps of logic and lie. A good book that exposes the way these frauds operate is “Not out of Africa” by Mary Lefkowitz.”
One may easily pick through all of the claims in this article and find the truth of his exaggerations and lies. It is simply too easy.
Dubois is also well known for having hailed the communist movements in Russia and China. He called Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung brilliant. This man is a real hoot. I actually used him as an example of anti-White hate mongering to a group of young Black men - with success. Few knowledgeable Blacks today wish to acknowledge DuBois because his claims and actions were so blantantly incorrect.
Had a discussion with a white college student who was taking an African Studies class, he told me that it was a real eye-opener for him about how much blacks have contributed and our debt to them. There was no reasoning with him, the brainwashing had taken hold.
“America as we know is would have been impossible.”
Exactly correct. Without blacks, America would be much like Canada or Australia were like in the 1950s; prosperous, and safe.
Blacks ruined the US; they didn’t “build” it.
So basically, blacks today are ridiculously backwards compared to the blacks of 100 years ago?
I would like to post this link as an antidote to the nonsense posted here (and to those who feel the Asian contribution to society is so large). It is a little long but please read as what he says is so true-that not only on an intellectual level, but a Humanistic level has White European thought contributed above all others to peace and prosperity and it is a shame we don’t adhere to these tenets.
http://thegoldbugnet.blogspot.com/2009/02/peace.html
“Black soldiers and slaves helped save New Orleans during the war of 1812”,,,,,,
Except for one minor detail. The war had ended more then two weeks BEFORE the battle was fought.
Again I ask, how did they achieve such greatness while slaves and yet as free men, contribute nothing to advancing civilization? And why do they have such difficulty applying all that they created to better themselves? Has this knowledge also been ‘stolen’ from them as well?
After decades of repeating the claims of great black achievements, this hasn’t seemed to inspire blacks to achieve anything anymore.
“Black destruction of urban white America is the reason why we have no High Culture, and why we live dispersed far from one another, linked mostly by the media, which is under the control of another ethnic group.”
Posted by Anonymous at 1:36 PM on February 18
> Another ethnic group,…. I detect the erroneous notion of a common fraudulent conspiracy theory. For every Jew in the media, there are five Christians and ten agnostic/atheists.
Other than that, I think the remainder of your post is a great insight into a phenomena that was not planned, but occurred due to things like automobiles and the development of suburbs during the baby boom years combined with a lack of will in containing the spread of drugs and drug culture. As an example, my parents were going up to Tahoe to gamble once a month, thereby supporting and idolizing the same guys who made the mafia possible - and cool. Then, the CIA indulging in the drug trade for raising covert funds for unapproved actions worldwide, etc.
“Black soldiers and slaves helped save New Orleans during the war of 1812”,,,,,,
Except for one minor detail. The war had ended more then two weeks BEFORE the battle was fought.
Posted by Anonymous at 9:43 PM on February 18
> That’s right, and the main help came from the French “pirates” led by Jean Lafette. Jackson would have won without the few black soldiers and slaves, but without Lafette’s men and their cannon, he would have lost without a doubt.
W.E.B. DuBois was an admitted Communist, and was supported by the Communist Party, much like Martin Luther King, because he advocated those aspects of communist ideology that would destroy America: forced integration, undeserved ‘equal rights’, and redistribution of wealth through social reparations and welfare. No wonder this book is being re-published.
A very biased article, but what would we expect from the AP?
Yes. America would be different without Blacks. Only for the better! For one thing, we would not have to put up with such outlandish lies that the Black soldiers made the difference in the Civil War.
If the world of 200 years ago had the techologies of the internet, e-mail, inter-continental regular and pocket cell phones, television, fax messages, and other advancements we take for granted today, the Battle of New Orleans would never have taken place. This is because both the Americans and the British would have known the War of 1812 was over, just as soon as the Treaty of Ghent was signed.
That would have made Andrew Jackson “Old Hickory” furious! Then Andy would not have been able to get his personal revenge for his lifelong hatred of the British, which started at the age of 14, when a British officer injured him with his sword for refusing to clean his boots.
But this leaves me with a question, if the world of 200 years ago had this kind of technology, would slaves be sold on eBay?
It is unclear if he was born in Morocco of black African parents or was brought to Azemmour from west Africa by the trans-Saharan slave trade.
Estevanico most certainly was not European.
Gross exaggeration and/or outright lies is the stock in trade of both non-white and self-hating white Marxist history revisionists.
